Nn Council Oks Chief's Drug Plan

NEWPORT NEWS — A sharply split City Council narrowly backed Police Chief Jay Carey in calling for a revision in the way first-time cocaine cases are moved through the judicial system.

Carey's, and now the council's, proposal calls for the General Assembly to change state law by streamlining the judicial process in such cases. Passed 4-3, the proposal would let lower court judges offer first-offender status to suspects arrested for holding small amounts of cocaine for the first time.

Currently, because cocaine possession is a felony, first-offender status must be offered at the higher circuit court level, but only after a preliminary hearing in General District Court and then another hearing before a grand jury. The process is often dragged out still further by continuances at each level, Carey said.

Under first-offender status, which Carey said is routinely offered, suspects who plead guilty are placed in a strict one-year program of drug testing and counseling. If they complete the program, their felony conviction is dropped. If they don't, they are sentenced to jail.

Carey said the process is tied up unnecessarily because the first-offender deal can currently be offered only at the circuit court level. He said the courts crammed with cocaine users making their way up the judicial ladder, and police officers must come off the street to testify at each rung in the process.

Councilman Terrence K. Martin, a lawyer, attacked Carey's proposal saying that the cocaine users he has known need all the incentive possible to break their addiction. The one- to 10-year jail sentence currently enforceable against first-time cocaine users isn't always enough, and weakening the potential sentence would do no one any good, he said.

But Carey emphasized that his proposal wouldn't downgrade cocaine possession from a felony to a misdemeanor or change the sentences that could be handed down. It would just streamline the judicial system, he said.